Paper Cuts
by Sashocirrione
Summary: L gets some paper cuts and suddenly Light's brain goes haywire with weird metaphors and symbolic visions. LxLight and LightxL.


**Title: **"Paper Cuts"

**Author: **Sashocirrione

**Spoilers: **MAJOR Spoilers for everything up to chapter 58 of the manga and episode 25 of the anime.

**Warnings: **NO UNDERAGE READERS. Rated M for a reason. Sexual activities.

**Summary: **L gets some paper cuts and suddenly Light's brain goes haywire with weird metaphors and symbolic visions.

**Pairing: **LxLight

**Additional Notes: **All canon events previous to the start of this fic have occurred as normal.

**Disclaimer:** I do not own Death Note, and I do not make any money from these writings.

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Light knew it was Matsuda's fault. He was always clumsy, always trying to help but, really, he wasn't much more than a coffee boy most of the time, and Watari could do that task much better. Matsuda had tried to hand a stack of reports to L, but Matsuda had made a little clumsy twisting motion at the last second, and L had grabbed, and the papers had gone fluttering all over the floor while L breathed in a series of little hisses and limply dangled his hand in front of his face, staring at the bright red beads slowly forming along the painful little cuts on four of his fingers, a completely helpless look in his big dark eyes.

Light couldn't stand it and before he knew it he'd jumped from his chair and closed the distance between them, the chain pooling on the floor with a gliding metallic sound, and he'd taken L's hand by its limp wrist and was delicately licking the drops away. L did nothing to stop him but said, "The human mouth is one of the most germ-ridden places there is. You could be giving me diseases."

Light finished the job and said, "Saliva contains substances that help to heal and protect cuts. That's why animals have the instinct to lick their own wounds."

L countered with, "That's because you can't give yourself a disease you already have. I should have been licking my own fingers, not you."

Still, neither of them moved away from each other, and everyone else in the room was silent, a kind of tension growing and building. Light could taste the metallic flavor of the blood on his tongue. It had been just a few drops, and they had been so very red. Red as the brightest berries he'd ever seen.

Light said, "Then, we'd better take you to the medical room and disinfect these cuts."

L got up slowly, and still Light could almost feel a buzzing in the room, a gathering electric feeling like just before a thunderstorm. He imagined, a silly little fantasy really, that now that L's blood was inside him they had some kind of bond, something magical like in a movie or a fairy tale. Maybe L was a vampire and Light was now his human servant, having licked up that red essence.

L, as usual, went ahead, not waiting for Light but assuming that Light would follow before the chain jerked him. Except now, after thinking about red blood and fairy tales, Light was imagining that chain as the red string of fate featured in so many old legends. It was invisible, but it bound together those whose destinies were intertwined. Especially... lovers.

Light followed those slouching shoulders and the subtle step-by-step bounce of the fluffy black hair. It looked coarse, but he'd touched it a few times, just a few, and it was as soft and silky as down from a baby duck. L's movements were so predictable, the way his feet shuffled, the way his elbows splayed outward as his hands were thrust deep in his pockets, it was like reliving a dream over and over, knowing the remembered parts before you got to them. It was almost hypnotic, following that man who was always, always on the front part of the chain, leading along to wherever it was they were going, round and round the hallways of this big empty skyscraper, like mice running through a maze.

And then, they were there, in the medical room, except that this room had been built for so much more than ordinary medical tasks. The central feature was a large stainless steel cot that people could be strapped to for any unwilling body cavity searches that might become necessary. Yes, L thought that someday, Kira's every orifice might need looking into before he was thrown into some cell, and Kira might not be compliant, and so here was a piece of furniture, sitting in the middle of it all, that seemed as if it belonged in a horror movie and not here, not in this room where Light was gently tending to his friend's wounds as L crouched in a chair, spraying them with disinfectant and then spreading a dot of ointment on each cut and then a wrapping bandage on each of the four fingers.

When it was done, there was an atmosphere in the room that Light didn't want to leave behind. Somehow, his mind drifting around strange corners of fantasy, he'd broken out of the ordinary routine and here, right here and now, it was a pleasant place, with nothing awful looming over them, a place just to the side of the regular stream of time which was now running along without them. They had, indeed, stepped into a fairy tale, taken a magical path or slipped into a rabbit hole like Alice in Wonderland and now they were here in this in-between space where real life didn't exist and the rules were somehow different. But, Light was done now, and they'd have to go back, right? Going back to the room with the others would break the spell, stop this thing and that wasn't good. Maybe something could be said to avert it.

Light said, "Well, my mouth is safe for you after this. If it had diseases, I just now gave them to you when I licked your cuts, so there's nothing worse it could do to you."

L looked and looked at Light's mouth, and Light felt that tension, that electricity in the room again, and he imagined the red string of fate connecting them, formed entirely of bright, perfectly round, red drops of blood. Red like the strawberries or raspberries or cherries that L was always consuming, one after another disappearing into that mouth, and somehow the constant sounds of him eating and chewing, even when he was talking to all of them at the same time, somehow these sounds were never irritating. They were just part of L, of what L did, of the constant background events Light had learned to know, to be so intimately familiar with he didn't even think about them hardly at all. In so many ways, Light and L, L and Light, they were already like an old married couple, knowing absolutely everything about each other except those secrets they dare not speak.

And then, there was a sigh escaping from those lips, L's lips, and Light couldn't help but think how pale they looked. L's skin was pale, his lips were pale, but they shouldn't be, it wasn't healthy.

Light said, "When my mother saw us with pale lips, she would tell us to rub them until they turned the right color again."

And then, Light was reaching out his hands to L's lips, those soft dry lips, and rubbing with his fingers, rubbing hard, bringing real color into them. L looked up at him with eyes like black pools of ink, the eyes of some fairy-tale creature, a crouching little goblin or gargoyle, and he let Light do it, a small sigh escaping from his lips, and L's feet, his bare feet, dropped down to the floor for once, resting where they should be, as L tilted his head upward and let Light rub and massage the color into his lips, flushing pink with the vigorous motions and then almost red.

L sighed again, and with a deep look in his deep, deep eyes he bit gently at Light's fingers, and Light let L draw them in and nibble and lick, and the electricity in the room increased a hundredfold and then Light was moaning L's name over and over again. They'd all been told not to call him "L" ever, but Light did, a steady stream of little blasphemies, because this was a place outside of time and the rules weren't the same here. L knew it, he agreed, he did nothing, said nothing, to stop that name from spilling out of Light's lips.

And then, somehow, without thinking about it, without talking, they were tugging at each other's clothing, working on buttons and zippers and L was pulling Light's belt away. It made a low zinging sound as it slid quickly through the belt loops and away.

And then, Light was kneeling on the floor and lapping his tongue along the most intimate part of L as he stroked his own length, calmly, steadily, and L reached down, ever agile and flexible, and stroked along with him, and it was something that could only happen now, here, in this place apart from time, where somehow every myth and legend was converging in Light's brain and making it spin in circles.

And then, before he knew it, he was making L cry out his name, repeating, "Light, Light," in the most passion-filled voice Light had ever heard in his life as L's body jerked and quivered in pleasurable spasms and Light licked up all traces of the bitter white liquid he'd helped L to produce.

And then, it was L's turn to change that hand job into his own chance to prove just how good his lips and mouth and tongue could be, and it was more than Light would have thought, so intense and wild and sloppy and hungry that Light had to hold back not to shame himself with a release within the first few seconds of L's tongue wrapping around his hardened member as he kneeled helplessly on the floor.

And then, as the inevitable pleasure rose, the legends swirling in his brain were coalescing around one image, one figure of so many countless myths from all eras of history, the mystic who climbs the mountains and goes into seclusion, seeking self-knowledge from some little cave far away from the corrupt bustle in the crowded valleys below. It was important, it was terribly important somehow, it was a gift being given to him in this place where time no longer flowed, and he had to grasp it, grasp it before it was gone. The string of blood-droplets was swaying before his vision now and it led, it led... his eyes didn't want to follow it to its end-point, to its resolution.

Light was releasing into L, his hands digging into L's shoulders as the man calmly took him in, eating him up as if he were a simple banana, taking everything Light had to give into that marvelously wet, warm mouth of his, and in that moment Light thought that maybe, just maybe, he'd managed to snag that gift, that symbolic gift that his screwed-up brain was trying to shove at him with all the weird metaphors.

And then, the two of them were simply breathing in and out, no other sound in the silence, a litany of pants, both looking at the floor, not at each other. What would they say about what they'd just done? Who would bring up the topic first? Or, would it be a one-time event, always ignored and never brought up again?

That mountain cave... there was something about it... self-knowledge... working from seclusion.

Light said, "You trust my deductions on the case, don't you?"

L breathed, "Yes. I always have."

"I think... I think Higuchi is too dangerous. You're used to working cases by communicating with your investigation team with a computer from some secluded, anonymous location. You've already gained everything you can by showing your face, and now there's nothing you can do here that you can't do from afar. You need to hide yourself away again. Give orders to my dad and the others through the computers. Get away from this."

"I need to watch you in person."

"Then," Light said, "bring me with you into hiding. I think, if you stay, it will get too dangerous and everyone will die."

L said, "I believe you."

And then, in just a few hours, they were gone, leaving a very angry Misa behind, but the rest of the team members were understanding, knowing that a distant, unreachable L should keep a Kira from killing them, since it would be a futile move to kill underlings as long as the lead investigator survived.

Higuchi's capture was almost too easy, deceptively easy. Light and L predicted together every single move he would make and, at last, when he was trapped, it happened. The complete reversal that unraveled the case. Higuchi suddenly didn't know anything about being Kira. The case stalled. Higuchi couldn't be convicted. Nobody could be convicted. And, the deaths stopped completely. Everyone was stumped, L most of all.

But, whenever Light had a moment of calm introspection about the matter, he had a feeling that he'd somehow been in the path of a speeding train that whole time, and at the last moment, he'd somehow managed to fling himself free of the tracks just before he would have been cut to pieces.

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**A/N (Author's Note):**

Well, experimenting with a different writing style here, one that's dream-like and weird. I hope it worked.

The theme is once again from the DN kink meme on livejournal, as many of my short pieces are.


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